CWC is pleased to welcome Dan Ackerstein to our Board of Directors! Dan brings 20 years of experience as an environmental sustainability consultant, including work on habitat restoration and water stewardship. His fascination with the environment and water began as a reporter for his high school newspaper while writing an in-depth piece on the changing health of the marine environment around Siesta Key, Florida, the island on which he grew up. Since then, Dan has built a career and life centered on environmental sustainability and water in its various forms, receiving degrees from Tufts University (Environmental Policy) and Duke University (Corporate Environmental Management) and working in the private sector, public sector, and NGO world.
“Through CWC, I hope to have a meaningful and direct impact on the community where I live and work,” Dan said. “The San Lorenzo River is an incredible ecological resource as well as a foundational community resource. I want to help CWC maximize both the health and sustainability of our watershed as well as the ecosystem services and community benefits it provides.”
Dan coaching junior lifeguards in Santa Cruz
Dan’s career has centered on the relationship between business and the environment. While his initial focus was on corporate and institutional impacts produced by the operation of large facilities and campuses, in recent years his work has broadened to include nature-based riverway habitat restoration projects in California and Colorado, as well as innovative programs around alternatives to rodenticide and ecologically sound pest control strategies. Currently, Dan advises sustainability-minded clients while also serving on the Santa Cruz City Parks & Recreation Commission as well as the Santa Cruz Junior Lifeguard Booster Club Board.
Dan spends an inordinate amount of his waking hours in the ocean, moving over, through, and with the waves and kelp in all variety of craft and toys. When he’s not in varying states of wetness or sandiness, Dan is likely to be found coaching youth athletes in surf lifesaving, obsessing about his daughters’ water-based sports careers (collegiate rowing and swimming, respectively) while walking the dogs with his veterinarian wife, and reading books about beavers. Welcome to the CWC team, Dan!
